Oblivion
by Min Daae
Summary: Between seasons 3 and 4. He could tell you that nothingness has a feeling, and it is this. Warning for brief, very non-explicit dub-con.


He didn't know, afterwards, how he even made it out of the kitchen.

It was all a blur, and he was glad of that, glad he didn't have to remember more than the heavy weight of a dead body in his arms or the tacky feeling of drying blood on Sam's shoulder from where it dribbled down Dean's chin. The few vivid flashes he had were enough. He didn't want the complete memory.

He did remember silence. Like someone had pressed the mute button on the entire world and all the sound just stopped, and everything else stopped too, except for Sam and Bobby.

He put Dean in the passenger seat of the car. Sam thought he remembered telling Bobby to follow. Bobby said later that he hadn't wanted Sam to go alone but everything had moved too fast.

It hadn't felt fast to Sam. It felt slow like molasses, like every step he was fighting through tar instead of air.

A motel room in Pontiac, then, and he remembered bringing Dean in and laying him out, stitching the gaping wounds closed with slow neatness, washing the blood away, dressing Dean carefully. His thoughts wouldn't connect, wouldn't function, and even if they had he was just so empty.

_Oh, Sam, _Bobby said when he stepped inside, and he sounded old. _God…_

Sam reached out and straightened Dean's shirt. He was so quiet, unnaturally quiet. Say something, he almost whispered, but said instead, _We'll bury him tomorrow, okay? Out there, by the side of the road. _

He wondered if Dean would want the Impala buried with him, like old Mongolian chieftans and their horses. The thought struck him as absurd and he laughed, sharply, soundlessly, and then abruptly found he couldn't breathe.

Bobby had to remind him how and even then it didn't feel like his lungs would fill properly. He accepted a drink that was shoved in his hand and tossed the whole thing down, not caring what it was.

_You drugged me, _he said, when he figured it out, but it wasn't a complaint. He managed to make it to the other bed to curl up next to Dean's corpse before oblivion-sleep dragged him under.

He slept without dreams, swallowed up by blankness, and it was the best thing he'd ever felt.

The next morning, still half in that strange state of calm stickiness, they buried Dean. Sam could have made the coffin himself, but Bobby brought one back in his truck. It occurred to Sam that while he'd dug up a lot of graves, the number he'd dug the other way were very few. Bobby tried feebly, and once, to tell him that a hunter's funeral was better, they had to burn the body.

Sam just looked at him and Bobby's voice died so fast that Sam almost, dimly, thought to wonder what he looked like. He knew his clothes smelled like death and blood and he didn't care. Didn't care about much.

He made the grave shallow, but not too shallow. Four feet should do it, he decided, and dug down, not glancing at the shroud wrapped shape resting in the back seat of the car. If he did…

Sam suspected Bobby didn't argue with his choice of burial because he half expected Sam to refuse even that little decency.

It was with deliberate care that Sam placed Dean's body in the pine coffin, not too thick, the lid deliberately weakened when the older hunter hadn't been looking. They both carried it to the hole and lowered it in, and Sam looked down, wondering where this sudden calm had come from.

He let Bobby cover up the grave and bow his head, speak a few words. He felt Bobby's eyes on him, expecting something, but Sam just shook his head. He would find a way. _I'll dig you out again, Dean. Soon. _

But he said the words only inside his own skull.

Bobby's hand was heavy on his shoulder. _Come back to my place, boy, _he said. _I don't – we both shouldn't be alone right now. _

You mean me, Sam thought, but he just nodded, _okay, _and Bobby seemed surprised at his agreement. He didn't know what else to do, though, where to start. Dean was in hell and he was here and nothing made sense anymore.

~.~

Sam left Bobby's after a week. He burned his bloodstained clothes and found every nook and cranny that Bobby tried to use to keep alcohol away from him. He told Bobby once, drunkenly, that he was a hypocrite for trying to hide it in the first place, an accusation that Bobby hadn't even bothered to answer.

It didn't feel good. It didn't even help. But it was a lesser misery to distract from the worse.

Bobby's sympathy was too much, though, Bobby's clumsy attempts to get him to talk, Bobby's own grief that Sam couldn't share in.

Grief wasn't enough of a word, enough of a feeling, to encompass the mutilated, shredded way he felt.

So he took the Impala and drove. It hurt, sitting in the car every day by himself, but that was the way things were supposed to be, and he accepted it as no less than his due for failure. He ate when he felt faint and drank most of the rest of the time.

And hunted.

It didn't take him long, Sam thought, to adjust to being without a partner. Broward County was still close enough behind that he remembered the motions of being alone, watching your own back, nursing your own wounds. Perhaps he was supposed to be grateful to the Trickster for that.

It was while stitching closed a gash on his leg, deep and long and bleeding freely, that Sam thought of Dean telling him to _live. _He looked down at the gaping red wound in his flesh, the thread pulled taut halfway through a stitch, and thought, and this is living?

He laughed, then, until he cried, and it was the first time that he had since kneeling on the floor holding Dean's cooling corpse, after the hounds had gone.

It didn't feel cleansing, or freeing, or anything that crying was supposed to be. It wasn't a release. It just left him feeling more empty than before.

He had expected Dean to haunt him. To see shadows of him everywhere, in girls he would have liked and the music he listened to. It was worse when there was nothing. The music was just white noise and the girls looked just the same, and it all just served to make the world more hollow, and Sam wondered how he hadn't seen it before.

People looked at him with pity and faint revulsion, and Sam wondered if they could tell that he was half of a whole, like a man walking around with his guts hanging out, tumbling into his open hands.

And meanwhile Dean was screaming in Hell.

~.~

Ellen Harvelle called only a couple weeks after he'd left Bobby's, making sure to vanish without a trace. _Sam, _she said, _you should come to the Roadhouse. I think – Jo and I, we want to see you. _She cleared her throat. _We heard about – Dean. _

Sam held the phone to his ear and waited, staring at the corpse of the man who had been a werewolf. He remembered Madison, remembered all the things that Dean had said afterward, _there was nothing else we could do, Sammy, she didn't want to kill anyone, she didn't want to become a monster, _and Sam had said _you know, Dean, are you thinking of who this sounds like? _

Dean had gone quiet and pressed his lips together in the way that meant he was angry but didn't have anything to say.

_Sam? _Said Ellen.

_I'm fine, _he said, _fine. Did Bobby tell you to call? _

_Please come by,_ she said again, and there was a note of pleading in her voice. _I'm worried about you. _

Sam felt himself make a noise deep in his throat and just said, _don't call me again _and hung up. He threw away the phone and fled to a bar, where he drank himself hard and fast into unconsciousness but not before punching a guy in the mouth, pretty much just because he felt like it.

He woke up in an alley with blood on his knuckles and the taste of vomit on his tongue. That night he decided on surrender and drove to a crossroads, but no one was selling. They didn't want his filthy soul. Understandable, Sam thought briefly, neither did he.

But now he had no choice. Nowhere to go, nothing to trade.

Sam started hunting Lilith.

Maybe, he thought, maybe if he caught up to her he could force her to make a deal. Maybe if he had her he could get Dean back.

Maybe. What a stupidly optimistic word.

Sam wasn't in the mood for optimism anymore.

~.~

He caught his first demon barely a week later.

_Well well well, _it said, out of the mouth of its host, a teenage boy who'd had a promising athletic career until he'd started using heroin just last week. _Look who it is. Sammy Winchester. We hear your name all the time. Except now it's mostly just your big brother screaming it. _

_Where's Lilith, _Sam said, simply, flatly, trying not to think.

_Oh yes, _it said, as though he hadn't spoken. _You have no idea, do you? What he's suffering. I'll tell you what…you exorcise me, I'll be sure to make it worse. Let him know it's all your fault. _

Sam laughed, harshly, and didn't recognize the sound from his own throat. _If you can make him believe that you're better than I am, _he said, and recited the exorcism, from memory.

The boy died. It took him a couple minutes, though, after the demon had left. He looked up at Sam and asked for water. _I don't understand, _the boy said. _What did I do wrong? _

I ask myself the same question every day, Sam thought, but he gave the boy some water without replying.

_I don't understand, _the kid said again, and Sam felt his mouth twist in something that might have been a smile, once upon a time.

_Neither do I, _he said, and the boy looked a little betrayed, like he'd somehow expected Sam to have all the answers. Sam knew better than that. There were no answers, only questions, and at the end of it all you died.

Even drinking himself into a stupor didn't chase off the feverish dreams of Dean screaming his name over and over and over again, and Sam woke up with enough of a headache that he almost believed it was a vision.

A month after Dean's death, Sam realized that the pity in peoples' stares had changed to fear. He looked at his reflection and stared at the almost gaunt face, unkempt hair, unshaven cheeks. He shaved, but that only brought out his eyes, and Sam wondered where all the warmth in him had gone.

But he didn't have to wonder for long.

Lilith remained elusive. None of the demons talked unless it was about the torments Dean was suffering. He heard that Bobby was looking for him and covered his tracks more thoroughly. He walked into a hunter's bar in Michigan and half of the occupants walked out, while the rest looked like they wanted to reach for their guns.

They never spoke to him, but they never came after him either. Sam thought maybe they were scared of him.

Sam hated all of them for being alive. He wondered if vengeful spirits felt the same way; hated the living because they were living.

~.~

_Well, you're a pretty picture, _Ruby said.

Sam cocked a shotgun at her. _You're out, _he said, _and Dean's not. Why? _

Ruby just smiled at him. _Only demons get out of Hell, Sammy. Are you sure you want him back like that? _

He aimed the shotgun at her chest. _Get out. _

She got, to his surprise, though not for long.

Dean had been gone for a month and a half. Sam still ordered a room with two beds, though he didn't know why. There was still no sign of Lilith, but Bobby hadn't found him either.

Ruby had saved his life, but he felt no obligation. She thought he was pathetic. She thought he drank too much and didn't eat enough. She thought he was killing himself by inches.

Sam was pretty sure she was right about all of the above, but what she wasn't right about was that it mattered. Maybe Dean had wanted him to live, but when had Sam ever done what Dean wanted? When had he ever been anything but selfish?

It was just the way things were.

Ruby came back again. She threw away his alcohol and shoved him into a shower. Then she shoved him down onto the bed and fucked him hard while he was still half in a drunken haze.

It was the first time, he thought, that he'd felt anything _real _since Dean died. _No, _he'd said, weakly, and she had pressed her hands to his chest and grinned at him like a death's head.

_Make me. _

He hated her, hated her and the way she dragged him back from the abyss inch by inch no matter how hard he fought her. Hated the way she made him think rather than just act and react. Hated the way that she reminded him that if he wanted revenge he had to survive for it.

Hated the way he could have sent her back to hell any minute and didn't.

She made him bathe, made him eat, poured out every drink he bought. And every night, slid into his bed and pressed warm skin against him, forcing Sam to remember that he was alive.

He wasn't grateful for his life. How could he be? But she would lead him to Lilith, and she was all he had.

~.~

Sam killed his first demon with her watching. The woman survived, but Sam was on his knees, bleeding from his nose, head aching. Ruby knelt beside him and brought out a knife, gashed her wrist open.

_Here, _she said. _Just trust me. It'll help. I promise. _

Sam thought of all the promises made. To save, to kill, to save or kill, that nothing bad would ever happen _as long as I'm around. _He thought of sacrifice and martyrdom and a slow fall that couldn't be stopped. He thought of a worthless soul and a crossroads and the demon queen he meant to end.

And when she died – what then? Dean was still in hell, and Sam was still alive.

He turned his head to look at the woman, whose eyes were open and wide and full of horror, and Ruby, who looked at him with calm and patience. He thought of oblivion and dreamless sleep and the everlasting myth of peace.

_Remember what Dad taught you, _Dean said, _and remember what I taught you. _

But Sam was selfish, and Dean wasn't here, and he had to do what he could.

He lowered his mouth to Ruby's arm and drank, and it tasted like nothingness.


End file.
